SH Archive Why It Was Faster To Build Subways in 1900

[KD Archive]

Ran across this article, and could not help it, but to post the below quotes:

• The image of a single engineer wielding a piece of technology no more sophisticated than a hammer isn’t what most people have in mind when they think of modern infrastructure projects. But it may be the fastest technology available to New Yorkers, even now—especially now, as the Second Avenue subway, a project that began planning in the 1910s, has been under construction since 2007, is not yet open. By contrast, workers laid over 9 miles of track across Manhattan in only four years after initial groundbreaking. “The fact that we still don’t have a subway under Second Avenue is kind of amazing,” says Polly Desjarlais, a senior educator at the New York Transit Museum.

• So if we could build a new subway line in four years back in the early 1900s, why is the Second Avenue line taking so long? Why are we still using so much infrastructure that’s more than 100 years old? What has changed in the last hundred or so years for the subway?
• Why It Was Faster To Build Subways in 1900

The City Hall station of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line opened on October 27, 1904.

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[pushamaku]

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Username: pushamaku
Date: 2019-10-30 05:16:37
Reaction Score: 2

Bureaucracy, unions, corruption, etc...

The NYC subway's construction costs are too high—and the reasons why are infuriating

I guess it gets in the way of retrofitting all those pre-exising tunnels. The piece below by tech_dancer makes some interesting points on this.. Didn't know that these old "churches" had access to these tunnels...

Энергетика прошлого. Тайны метрополии — Тарт-ария.инфо (use google translator)

 

[Timeshifter]

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Username: Timeshifter
Date: 2019-10-30 07:53:19
Reaction Score: 6

For me the obvious answer, it is easier/ quicker to dig out and repair an existing bunch of tunnels, than build them from scratch.